What If You Get Discouraged?

Perseverance, determination, focus, and hard work are effective in helping you attain your goals. Refusal to give up is essential. Getting up every time you stumble or fall will eventually lead to success. The big unknown is how long will it take to see results.
Everyone would love to see their efforts produce rapid, if not immediate results. But if you don’t know how long something will take, how do you keep yourself motivated? Even the most successful people get discouraged.
It’s natural to think that maybe your efforts won’t pay off. Perhaps, for some unknown reason, others can accomplish what you are attempting while you can not. When self-doubt seeps in, you begin to consider abandoning your quest. Why not just set your sights lower and retreat to a former comfort level?
Working to accomplish anything you really want exposes you to discomfort and insecurity. There are no guarantees. You have to rely on yourself. The greater your goal, the more nerve wracking the journey.
Feeling discouraged is normal. No one can or will feel up beat and energized 100% of the time. It’s hard to keep going when there are no immediate measurable results. Achieving a goal is a journey that consists of many steps. Although any step, if looked at alone, seems insignificant, it’s the sum of all of the steps that leads to a destination.
If you were to drive from California to New York, you would be facing a journey of about 3,000 miles. If you drove 500 miles a day it would take you six days to reach your destination. You wouldn’t see the border of New York until you were within a mile or less. For 2,900 miles your destination wouldn’t be visible.
During your trip you would encounter a variety of challenges. You would drive over mountains and across the vast expanses of the plains. A variety of weather conditions would be encountered. Perhaps your car would require repairs.
Should you decide you were not making progress and stop, you would never arrive in New York. You may get tired of driving. But in order to get to New York, you must keep going. If, regardless of how you felt each morning, you got back in your car and continued driving, you would keep making progress. But in this example you know exactly how far you have to travel and about how long it should take.
The big unknown with goal achievement, is the time frame. This is the factor contributing to discouragement. Without knowing the length of the trip, you could easily get discouraged after day after day of driving failed to bring your destination into sight.
Discouragement is devastating only when you give up. The antidote for discouragement is action. Should you stop and stress, you will get frustrated. Only by forging ahead will you consistently move toward your goal. Especially when you feel all of your efforts are producing no results, you have to call up more determination in order to keep going. Doing nothing will only make you feel worse.
There’s nothing wrong with you if you feel discouraged at times. Only by giving up will you fail. Refocus on your goal and never, ever give up. Refuse to quit. Continue taking one step at a time. You won’t know exactly when it will happen, but you will be successful.